The activist roots of Montreal’s famed Divers/Cité Festival and the future of Gay Pride

The single most important and influential gay event in the history of Montreal was the police raid of the Sex Garage loft party on the night of July 14, 1990, in Old Montreal. Named after director Fred Halsted’s 1972 black-and-white porn classic The Sex Garage, that party forever changed the face of Montreal.

In a nutshell, following the brutal police raid on Sex Garage (held in the now-boarded up 494 de la Gauchetiere building that will be demolished to make way for a new 35-storey condo tower), shocking images of police brutality during peaceful protests over the next two days finally and irrevocably shook three million Montrealers out of their complacency.

Montreal gays and lesbians — French and English — formed the group Lesbians and Gays Against Violence (LGV), precursor of the Table de concertation des gaies et lesbiennes du Grand Montréal, the political-action group pivotal in lobbying for the Quebec Human Rights Commission’s historic 1993 public hearings on violence against gays and lesbians (and there were still an estimated two gay-bashings in Montreal every week by the late 1990s).

La Table was also key in lobbying for the 1999 passage of Quebec’s historic Omnibus Bill 32, which extended benefits, pensions and social services to same-sex couples. That also led to veteran gay activist Michael Hendricks‘ 2004 Quebec Superior Court victory legalizing same-sex marriage in Quebec, a landmark ruling that also forced Ottawa’s hand in the 2005 national debate over same-sex marriage.

Sex Garage also inspired Bad Boy Club Montreal head honcho Robert Vézina to organize the BBCM’s first Black & Blue circuit party in 1991. “We thought everybody needed a breath of fresh air,” Robert told me years later.

And Montreal publicist Puelo Deir produced the outdoor stage show at Montreal’s Parc Lafontaine following LGV’s 1990 march from Montreal City Hall that, in tandem with other Sex Garage fundraisers, helped raise $5,000 to cover lawyers’ fees.

That march also laid the groundwork for Montreal’s Divers/Cité Queer Pride March that Deir co-founded with Suzanne Girard in 1993, a march that in 2007 morphed into this city’s internationally-renowned week long Divers/Cité queer arts and culture festival. (Disclosure: I sat on the Divers/Cité board until June 1996 when I began to write my national Three Dollar Bill column which was based at Montreal’s much-lamented alt-weekly HOUR magazine for the next 15 years.)

Together, over the next decade, Divers/Cité and Black & Blue would transform Montreal into a choice gay tourism destination, pushing Tourisme Montréal to create a gay tourism template since adopted by tourism authorities worldwide.

But in 1990, this was all unfathomable.

“Divers/Cité was just a part of an era that changed this city,” she says. “Stonewall [in New York City also] happened at a time when change was in the air, the same summer as Woodstock. It was the same thing here in Montreal. We were a part of it and it was natural for it to happen then.”

Today, Girard is still at the helm of Divers/Cité, which turns 19 this week. I remember back in 1994, Divers/Cité’s budget was a whopping $42,000. This year it is almost $1.9 million. And with funding back on track after the Harper Tories cut tourism grants to every Pride event across Canada last year, Suzanne happily told me this week, “All our hotels are full and that’s a good sign because that means there will be a lot of fresh meat in town!”

The Divers/Cité festival organized Montreal’s Pride parade from 1993 until 2006, when it handed over the reins to Célébrations de la Fierté. This year’s fifth annual edition of Célébrations de la Fierté’s Pride parade on August 14 reclaims Divers/Cité’s old downtown parade route along René-Lévesque Blvd. from Guy to Sanguinet streets. It’s true other gay events existed before Divers/Cité but, as Suzanne points out, “We were the first to take the parade out of the Gay Village.”

I also thought Divers/Cité was the first to close Ste-Catherine Street between Berri and Papineau into the summer-long pedestrian mall it is today but, Suzanne says, “The gay St-Jean did it way before us.

“I [also] remember when [the late] Normand Chamberland [the former cop who used to own the Bourbon complex in the Village] wanted to close down the street during Divers/Cité and have it become an outdoor casino! He told me, ‘Why don’t we do this?’ And we [at Divers/Cité] were Gay Pride activists then!” Suzanne laughs. “It could have been wild, now that I think of it!”

Personally I thought Divers/Cité spinning off the parade was a wise move (especially since surveys revealed that most folks who attended the expensive parade did not go to the rest of the festival). I thought the writing was on the wall: Now that gay people in Canada are 100% equal under the law, do we really need Pride parades anymore?

But Girard – one of my personal heroes and den mother at Divers/Cité for two generations of gay activists – scolded me. “There will always be Pride parades!” she said. “You need them for the youth. They will always need to come out and it’s always hard.”

And she is right.

So while Divers/Cité has morphed into a world-class music, arts and culture festival with a queer bent, Célébrations de la Fierté now organizes Pride in Montreal.

But Suzanne just wishes Célébrations de la Fierté would change their dates (this year August 9-14). “We have two big gay festivals two weeks apart and I think they [Célébrations de la Fierté] should move their dates to traditional Pride in June or to Labour Day. It would stop the confusion and would help us both out with [potential] sponsors.”

Of course, competing festivals are nothing new in Montreal. In fact, up until last year, the City of Montreal was pressuring Divers/Cité to move to the city’s new Quartier des Spectacles. The hope was Divers/Cité would move some of its mega-events there, like Mascara, 1 Boulevarde des Rêves and Le Grand Bal.

Says Suzanne, “We got an order from our board to move. But we couldn’t because the First Peoples’ Festival – usually held during the summer solstice [in June] – have Place des Festivals [from August 2-9]. They were forced to do their festival then because Spectra moved their FrancoFolies festival from August to June.”

What all this means is Divers/Cité will not move to the Quartier des Spectacles in the foreseeable future. “Now they don’t want us there. I really don’t know if what the city really wants is to keep us in the East End.”

But Suzanne has already moved on beyond the 20th anniversary of Divers/Cité in 2012. “Never mind the Quartier des Spectacles,” she says, “I want to take over the Old Port! Can you imagine!”

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